Letters to the editor

Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - 12:01 am

Problem is parenting

No one with any level of compassion could hear the news of the children killed in Connecticut without a strong feeling of grief and dismay. It is horrible for any person to die from violence, let alone a child. That being said, our response to such tragedy needs to be based on logic and not emotion.

As cold as it may sound, there are risks involved in living in a free society. The same freedom that allows individuals to pursue worthy goals also allows darker goals to be sought by a few. Predictably, the anti-gun/gun-control cry rings out.

Children in the United States are statistically far more likely to die in an auto accident than to be murdered by the use of a firearm; yet, there is no cry to ban cars and trucks. Chicago, with perhaps the strongest anti-gun ordinances in the United States, has had 485 murders in 2012 as of Dec. 2. Banning cocaine and methamphetamines hasn’t made them disappear.

Simply put, we can’t uninvent the wheel. We will have firearms whether they are banned or not. The cry to ban so-called assault rifles or limit magazine capacities is also na´ve. If victims of mass shootings do not have any means of stopping a criminal, does it really matter if the criminal has two 20-round magazines or four 10-round magazines for a weapon? If a rifle looks military, is it less dangerous in the hands of a criminal than a more traditional-looking hunting rifle that, by the way, is available in semi-automatic, in the same caliber, with multi-round magazines? And guess what, in that the main reason the founding fathers enacted the Second Amendment was so that the people would not be subjected to tyranny by their own government. I’m fairly confident they would want the people to have arms similar to that possessed by the government.

Let’s go after the First Amendment, too. The regulation we need for violent movies and video games is called parenting. We do not have a gun, movie or video game problem — we have a crime and lack of parenting problem.

Dennis L. Cooley

New Haven

We reap what we sow

So, again Dec. 14, our TV news is flooded with the news of a disturbed young man who has taken guns and ammo, entered a totally unsuspecting elementary school and viciously destroyed the lives of dozens of children and several adults. Then he turned the gun on himself.

How many of these horrific events have we had in recent years? When will it stop? How can we stop such insane mayhem? Will gun control put an end to the slaughter? Why do these things happen?

It is somewhat understandable, but not forgivable, when a drug deal goes sour and guns blow away the lives of young men and sometimes their families. But the school and theater shootings have no visible reason, there is no gain for the perpetrator.

So, we sit in front of our TVs in shock and horror, desperately looking for a way to end this homeland terror. It seems to me we look for answers in all the wrong places. Laws don’t stop the lawless. Reason and education don’t control the mentally unstable.

The answer to our social ills is not government gun control, but inner self-control. Why is it a mystery that young people kill young people when these same young people have spent thousands of hours for many years of their young lives playing violent video games and watching Rambo-type murderous movies? Then, when one of these murderous events happens, the media gives national exposure (15 minutes of fame?) to the most deranged, the most bizarre events of our time. It seems like each succeeding perpetrator tries to out-kill, out-smart the previous ones, thus raising the bar of mayhem.

The present generation is being brainwashed by the entertainment industry to solve all their problems with a gun. We need to stop lying to ourselves about the influence of our entertainment industry. Amusing ourselves with violence and mayhem brings a harvest of more of the same. We reap what we sow.

It is Christmas time. A time to celebrate all that is beautiful in this life and the life to come. Yet, na´ve parents will give their innocent children millions of violence-packed games and videos. Is this the way we want to teach our children to solve their problems? Who is to blame for the violence of our culture? Ourselves!